For Black History Month 2014 we are sharing little known facts about Madam Walker

Madam C. J. Walker was a patron of the arts who enjoyed promoting the works of young musicians, painters, singers and actors. (Photo: Madam Walker Family Archives)

Madam C. J. Walker very much enjoyed promoting the work of young African American artists. She hosted concerts to feature the work of black musicians and commissioned paintings by promising your artists. She enjoyed a ranged of music from ragtime and opera to spirituals and classical. Her home was filled with art and she counted musicians and actors like James Reese Europe, Bert Williams, Aida Overton Walker and Harry T. Burleigh among her friends.

One of the artists she particularly liked was William Edouard Scott (1884-1964), who was born in Indianpolis in the city where Madam Walker established her company headquarters in 1910. At her request, he painted a portrait of a local AME minister. Later he painted a scene of Walker’s Delta, Louisiana birthplace.

William Edouard Scott created an important body of work based on scenes he observed while living in Haiti.

From MichaelRosenfeldArt.com: “William Edouard Scott was raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he demonstrated an early aptitude for art. In 1904, he moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute (1904-1909). While a student there, Scott was commissioned to complete several murals in local schools; they are the earliest public works depicting African American subjects.”

“In 1909, Scott traveled to France, where he studied with Henry Ossawa Tanner. While abroad, he painted realistic images of Paris and the French countryside that reflected his academic training and the influence of Tanner. Scott sought to reinterpret Tanner’s dramatic use of light, his palette, and his expressive technique.”

William Edouard Scott was born in Indianapolis in 1884. He studied in Paris with Henry Osawa Tanner.

“When he returned to Chicago, Scott sold his Paris paintings and was able to fund a second trip to Europe, during which he studied at the Académie Julien and the Académie Colarossi in Paris. He returned to the United States in 1914 and devoted himself to documenting the life experiences of black people, traveling and sketching throughout the rural south. During World War I, Scott went back to France and sketched images of African American soldiers. Both sets ofdrawings appeared on covers of The Crisis.”

“In 1931, Scott was awarded a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship to study and paint in Haiti, where he adopted a more expressive style and brighter palette. He created over a hundred works during his thirteen months in Haiti and exhibited them in a Port-au-Prince show promoted by the Haitian government. The exhibition was an enormous success, and the president of Haiti purchased twelve works.”

Night Turtle Fishermen by William Edouard Scott 1931

“When he returned to the U.S., Scott painted for the Federal Art Project, creating public murals for the 1933 Chicago Worlds Fair. In 1943, he was the only black artist chosen to create a mural for the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, D.C. By the end of his life, Scott had created over seventy-five murals celebrating black history and culture. In 2007, the Indiana State Museum organized the traveling retrospective Our Own Artist: Paintings by Indiana’s William Edouard Scott, 1884-1964.”

William Edouard Scott’s paintings were featured in an exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1996

William Edouard Scott’s work was featured in an exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1996 along with the work of three other African American artists with ties to Indiana: John Wesley Hardrick, William Majors and Hale Aspacio Woodruff. The book, A Shared Heritage: Art by Four African Americans, was edited by William E. Taylor and Harriet G. Warkel.

“Frederick Douglass Appealing to President Lincoln and his Cabinet to Enlist Negroes.” This mural was painted by Scott for the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington, DC in 1943

Girls with Chicken by William Edouard Scott

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About A'Lelia Bundles

A'Lelia Bundles is an author, journalist, public speaker and president of the Madam Walker/A'Lelia Walker Family Archives. Her book, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, was a NY Times Notable Book. For more information visit www.aleliabundles.com